With more than 6 billion cell phone users in the world, the majority of them in developing countries, there are opportunities for point-of-care diagnostics and/or microscopic imaging applications using state-of-the-art phone technology. This can improve health care, especially in the developing world where medical facilities and infrastructure are extremely limited or non-existent.

Centered on this vision, Dr. Ozcan will introduce new imaging and detection architectures that compensate digitally for the lack of complex optical components available in cell phones by using novel theories and algorithms to address the immediate needs of telemedicine for global health problems. Ozcan will present an on-chip cytometry and microscopy platform that uses cost-effective and compact components to enable digital recognition and 3-D microscopic imaging of cells with subcellular resolution over a large field of view without the need for any lenses, bulky optical components or coherent sources such as lasers.

This modality has orders of magnitude improved light collection efficiency and is robust to misalignments, making it highly suitable for field use. Applications of this lensfree on-chip microscopy platform to high-throughput imaging and automated counting of whole blood cells, monitoring of HIV+ patients and detection of waterborne parasites will also be demonstrated. Ozcan will also discuss lensfree implementations of various other computational imaging modalities on the same platform such as pixel superresolution imaging, lensfree on-chip tomography, holographic optofluidic microscopy/tomography. And he will demonstrate lens-free on-chip imaging of fluorescently labeled cells over an ultrawide field of view which could be especially important for rare cell analysis as well as for high-throughput screening of DNA/protein micro-arrays.

Additional Questions and Answers from the Webinar:

Q: Are any of those microscopes open source? Can I get a file and print it myself? I mean 3-D image files for the microscopes in the first slide... still files so I can put it in a 3-D printer and print the plastic parts for the microscopes themselves. Could you ask him about the time reverse software as well?A: The codes and the 3D designs are not open source. There is a start-up company that I co-founded in Los Angeles, which is currently commercializing these technologies. You can learn more about this start-up (Holomic LLC) at : http://holomic.com/

Q: Were you able to track the motility of the sperms over the wide field?A: Yes, we can track the motility of sperms at a frame rate of ~90-150 fps over a large field of view of ~20 mm^2 and a depth of field of ~0.5 mm.

Q: Have you tried this with confluent tissue culture?A: For thick tissue samples that do not efficiently transmit light, our transmission on-chip imaging geometry can not be used. For such samples we have created a reflection based lensfree microscope. You can reach that specific work at: http://innovate.ee.ucla.edu/refereed-journal-publications.html. M. Lee, O. Yaglidere, and A. Ozcan, “Field-portable reflection and transmission microscopy based on lensless holography,” Biomedical Optics Express (2011) DOI:10.1364/BOE.2.002721

Q: Where can we get the routines for the superresolution techniques and the holographic reconstruction?A: Our codes are not open source. There is a start-up company that I co-founded in Los Angeles, which is currently commercializing these technologies. You can learn more about this start-up (Holomic LLC) at : http://holomic.com/

Q: Have you ever tried to image a TB bacilli? They are 2-4 um. Most importantly, would that be possible without staining? Would there be a significant phase information?A: Our recent work demonstrated imaging of single viruses (100-200 nm range). Therefore, imaging of TB bacilli would surely be feasible without a fluorescent tag. You can reach our viral particle imaging and related work at: http://innovate.ee.ucla.edu/refereed-journal-publications.html. O. Mudanyali, E. McLeod, W. Luo, A. Greenbaum, A.F. Coskun, Y. Hennequin, C. Allier, and A. Ozcan, ”Wide-field optical detection of nano-particles using on-chip microscopy and self-assembled nano-lenses,” Nature Photonics (2013) DOI:10.1038/NPHOTON.2012.337

Q: Is LUCAS currently being used in any country?A: We did field testing in Brazil and Turkey, in addition to US. Holomic LLC is further commercializing the LUCAS and related technologies for consumer market and wide scale deployment. More information can be found at: http://holomic.com/

Q: Thank you for your presentation. This is Will Hou from NRL. I wonder if this approach can benefit imaging through dense scattering medium?A: With a different set of reconstruction algorithms that better handle densely scattering media, it is feasible.

Q: How do you do fluorescent imaging, as you showed in the last slides. The re-emitted fluorescence shouldn't exhibit diffraction patterns such as fringes, shouldn't they?A: For fluorescent imaging, we do not use holographic reconstruction for obvious reasons. Our lensfree fluorescent microscopes are based on compressive decoding. More information on the specifics of fluorescent imaging can be found at: http://innovate.ee.ucla.edu/refereed-journal-publications.html

About Our Speaker

Dr. Aydogan Ozcan received his PhD at Stanford University Electrical Engineering Department. After a short post-doctoral fellowship there, he was appointed as a research faculty at Harvard Medical School, Wellman Center for Photomedicine in 2006. Dr. Ozcan joined UCLA in the summer of 2007, where he is currently an associate professor leading the Bio- and Nano-Photonics Laboratory at the electrical engineering and bioengineering departments.

Dr. Ozcan holds 22 issued patents (all of which are licensed) and more than 15 pending patent applications for his inventions in nanoscopy, wide-field imaging, lensless imaging, nonlinear optics, fiber optics, and optical coherence tomography. Dr. Ozcan gave more than 130 invited talks and is also the author of one book, the co-author of more than 260 peer reviewed research articles in major scientific journals and conferences. In addition, Dr. Ozcan is the founder and a board member of Holomic LLC.

Ozcan received several major awards including the 2011 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the 2013 SPIE BioPhotonics Technology Innovator Award, the 2011 Army Research Office Young Investigator Award, 2011 SPIE Early Career Achievement Award, the 2010 NSF CAREER Award, the 2009 NIH Director's New Innovator Award, the 2009 Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award, the 2009 IEEE Photonics Society (LEOS) Young Investigator Award and the MIT's Technology Review TR35 Award for his seminal contributions to near-field and on-chip imaging, and telemedicine based diagnostics.

Dr. Ozcan was selected as one of the top 10 innovators by the US Department of State, USAID, NASA, and NIKE as part of the LAUNCH: Health Forum organized in 2010. He also received the 2012 World Technology Award on Health and Medicine, which is presented by the World Technology Network in association with TIME, CNN, AAAS, Science, Technology Review, Fortune, Kurzweil and Accelerosity.

Dr. Ozcan is elected Fellow of SPIE, and is a Senior Member of IEEE, a Member of LEOS, EMBS, OSA, AAAS and BMES. For a complete biographical sketch, click here